These nine AI skills are creating multiple streams of income in 2026, and most
parents have no idea they even exist.
I want you to picture this.
It's 2029 and you're watching your neighbor Jessica next door.
She's packing up her own office, not because she got laid off.
No, no new.
It's because she just bought a bigger house.
While you were debating whether AI was just a fad or gonna take everyone's
job, she was quietly mastering nine specific AI skills that now generate
passive income streams in her life, exceeding her old corporate salary.
And here's the kicker.
She works fewer hours than when she was climbing someone else's corporate ladder.
The World Economic Forum projects that 39% of key job skills will change
by 2030, but these nine AI skills separate the top 1% of earners from
everyone else right this very minute.
Your success, DNA podcast, your success.
Is in your DNA.
What is up?
What the hell is up?
My dark horse, friends and family, welcome back.
Another some episode of the Dark Horse Entrepreneur AI Escape Plan,
where we break free from the grind.
We share some AI powered tips and side hustle strategies.
And of course, we support our parents out there chasing freedom like
the modern day is that they are.
And if you know someone who dreams of ditching the grind, but still
makes a little time for bedtime stories and nighttime snacks.
Giving those hugs out there, go ahead and forward this episode to them.
Okay, so we're gonna be talking about the nine AI skills that
will replace your paycheck while still keeping your family time.
While 90% of organizations are out there using ai, only about 9% have really gotten
a handle on it, maybe even mastered.
And how that gap is your golden ticket to freedom.
So the three things we're gonna cover today, one is the $18,000 wage premium
secret why AI skilled workers are earning 56% more than their peers.
Now you can join them without going out there and getting
a computer science degree.
Second thing, we're gonna talk about the automation goldmine, how automation
focused AI roles surge to 44% of the AI job postings out there, and why this shift
creates massive opportunities for my smart entrepreneurs, my smart parents out there.
And the third thing we're gonna be going over is the taste curation advantage.
The one skill that separates AI users.
From AI Masters and why it's more valuable than any technical certification.
Okay, so.
Lemme start as I always do, and, and here's what the career
experts will not tell you.
Ladies and gentlemen, the biggest career opportunity of our lifetime is not
happening all the way out there on the West Coast in Silicone Valley boardrooms.
It's happening in suburban home offices at kitchen tables.
Where parents are quietly building AI powered income streams that are starting
to dwarf their corporate salaries.
Yeah.
Uh, let me paint a picture that might be familiar to you.
It's Tuesday morning.
Maybe it's about 7:30 AM You are rushing the kid to get the kids
ready for school while simultaneously checking your emails, making lunches.
Prepping, doing some prep work for dinner.
You know all those emails that arrived overnight.
'cause your boss needs that report by noon and you find out your daughter
forgot a science project and you are already calculating whether
you are gonna be able to make it to the parent teacher conference
without having to take some time off.
Sound familiar?
Yeah.
This is where Jessica was at about two years ago and this is where her
story takes a turn that most parents, I think, currently believe is impossible.
Today?
Well, Jessica starts her morning off with coffee in the back patio.
No rush.
No fuss.
Yeah.
Maybe lets the dogs out to do their morning business.
She takes her kids to school herself, not because she has to squeeze it
in, but because she wants to her income, well, her income is about 40%
higher than her old corporate salary.
Her stress level.
Well, in that case, it's practically non-existent.
What changed?
You may ask.
Well, she discovered that while 90% of organizations now use AI in their
operations, only about 9% of them, maybe 10, have achieved AI maturity.
That gap, that massive gaping opportunity became her escape route.
And here's the part I think is gonna completely blow your mind a little bit.
She didn't need a computer science degree.
She didn't need years of coding experience.
She didn't need, need a massive time investment.
She needed nine specific skills that most people, parents
included do not even know exists.
So let me break down those nine skills, why they matter and how
you can start developing them.
This week, even if you are starting at ground zero, heck, even if you
are starting at a deficit, you ready?
Okay, here we go.
Skill number one, AI literacy.
This is your foundation for everything.
I want you to think of AI literacy as the foundation that everything
else is going to build upon.
It's not about memorizing a bunch of technical words and all the technical
jargon that's out there, but it is about understanding AI's capabilities
and its limitations well enough.
So that you can use it strategically.
The OECD defines AI literacy through five core competencies that every professional
needs, and they are critical thinking, collaboration, problem solving, self
and social awareness, and communication, critical thinking, that's evaluating
AI generated content for accuracy.
Bias, maybe even a little, uh, you know, hallucination in there.
Collaboration is working effectively with the AI systems that are out there
and their human colleagues side by side.
Okay.
Problem solving is knowing when and how to deploy AI for maximum impact.
Not every solution matches every scenario.
Okay?
Self and social awareness is recognizing how AI influences decisions.
As well as outcomes and finding communication is explaining
how and why AI is being used.
To colleagues and clients.
So for step number one, here's your action step this week.
Spend about 30 minutes a day experimenting with chat BT or Claude or Gemini you.
You pick whichever one you want to try, but don't just ask it.
Questions.
Challenge its responses, right?
Push it further.
Ask it to explain its reasoning, and notice when it's.
Confident versus uncertain.
Yeah.
You, you'll, you'll be surprised this builds your AI intuition faster
than any course that's out there.
Well, anyone I'm aware of anyway.
Okay.
Skill number two.
Prompt engineering.
When Anthropic posted, a prompt engineer and librarian position
was a salary of up to $335,000.
The tech world out there, they took notice.
Mind you, this was not for someone that had a PhD in computer science.
It was for someone who could effectively communicate.
With ai, prompt engineering is essentially programming in natural language, right?
It's the difference between asking AI to write something about dogs
and instructing it to create a 300 word veterinary guide about golden
retriever health issues written for.
Pet parents was an eighth grade reading level focusing
entirely on preventative care.
Completely different.
You're gonna get two completely different outputs there.
And we went into quite a bit about prompt engineering in the previous episode.
Please go ahead and go and check that out, but I'm gonna quickly
give you here a four part.
Prompt formula that you can use here.
It's role context command and format your role.
Act like a eh, whatever you want it to.
Uh, act like context.
Give it all the relevant background information command.
You wanna give it clear specific instructions on what it is you need and
how it is you want it to spit it out.
And that's where format comes in, how you want that output structured.
Entry level, prompt engineering roles started out what, $90,000
annually with advanced positions exceeding 150 grand a year.
And here's where the real money is.
Freelancers on Upwork and Fiber, they're charging 50 to 150 bucks per hour for
prompt engineering services with top performers out there earning six figure
recurring revenues from repeat clients.
So your homework on this one.
Take one task that you do regularly.
Maybe it's writing EOLs, maybe it's, uh, social media posts.
And develop yourself a master prompt that gets consistent high quality
results for you every single time.
And again, go back and check out that previous episode I talked
about creating your own personal master prompt in that episode.
Skill number three.
AI Tool proficiency.
This is your productivity multiplier here.
According to job posting Data Chat, GPT, Microsoft copilot and
cloud proficiency are among the top five most requested AI skills.
They want you to be proficient in one or more of those areas, but
the ecosystem is expanding rapidly.
Open AI is GPT-4 and GPT five models are getting new capability benchmarks.
I don't know, I think the last time I looked at it was like 5.6.
While image generation tools like Mid Journey and Dolly and others that
are out there are creating entirely new creative workflows, these aren't
highly technical specializations.
They're becoming as essential as email or spreadsheet skills.
And I'm gonna chuckle here for a moment because I know some of you out there.
Don't have email skills and don't have spreadsheet skills.
That's a whole nother podcast topic right there.
You need to have those skills, alright, just, just that's my personal opinion.
Their productivity gains are remarkable.
70% of co-pilot users report being more productive users, generally
complete tasks 29% faster.
Across searching, across writing, and across summarization skills using ai.
Microsoft Reports.
Co-pilot is saving employees an average of 10.
Hours per month, that adds up fast.
53% of professionals save an hour or two on average per day using generative ai.
53%. That's over half.
Okay.
But I think tool proficiency goes beyond knowing what tool to
use and what buttons it click.
It's about understanding when to use different AI tools for
different tasks, how to integrate them into existing workflows.
How to maintain some quality control while you're doing all that.
So here's your start here point.
For this one, pick one AI tool.
And become genuinely proficient with it before moving on to the
next one, I just wanna mean by that.
Master cat GPT for writing and then master Claude for analysis and then master
co-pilot it for productivity, right?
Depth beats breadth every single time.
Skill number four, critical AI evaluation.
This, this is your bs.
This is your bullshit detector.
I'm gonna go ahead and call it out right there.
Here's where many people are getting AI completely wrong.
They either trust it blindly or they dismiss it entirely.
And trust me, I've been looking at some of the comments on my YouTube videos.
Some people are still dismissing it entirely and saying that they're gonna
actively squash it in the action.
Okay.
Maybe they will.
I don't know.
The real skill, I think, is in knowing how to evaluate AI's
outputs critically and systemically.
Okay.
A study in, uh, 2024 done by the BBC found that AI assistance
misrepresented news content.
45% of the time.
Yeah, almost half.
Without proper oversight, relying on inaccurate AI output can have
some very serious consequences.
I know I have, uh, tapped into using AI for doing research in
some of my podcast episodes.
This one included, and I find I do have to go and make sure it's not hallucinating.
Okay.
Critical thinking in AI context involves.
These three skills verifying whether AI generated information
is accurate, relevant, and fair, actively identifying potential
misinformation and cross-referencing outputs, and then understanding how
AI systems can perpetuate or amplify existing biases that are out there.
Just saying, okay, so here's your practice routine for this one.
For every important AI output that you create, I want you to ask
yourself these three questions.
One, does this make logical sense?
Two.
Can I verify this information via another source?
And three, what may this AI be missing or getting completely wrong?
Okay, now that brings us to skill number five.
Skill number five is the AI powered data analysis.
This is your insight engine.
Data literacy has always been important.
I'm been a data geek for as long as I can remember.
Ai, I think is transforming how we interact with data.
It's really flipping it on its head, flipping it on its butt, you
might say, instead of spending hours upon hours, cleaning spreadsheets
or writing complex queries.
Power data analysis lets you ask questions like you're talking to a friend in
natural language and really get some sophisticated insights pretty damn quick.
Okay.
The average salary for an AI data analyst, $30,000 per year with top
earners making about 187 annually.
Not bad.
Right, right.
Yeah, exactly.
But you don't need a statistics degree in order to develop these skills.
The real power comes from combining domain expertise and AI capability.
A marketing professional who understands customer behavior and can use AI to
analyze campaign performance is going to outperform somewhere who just uses
technical skills or just uses their.
Marketing knowledge, right?
They're gonna integrate the two and they're gonna become
a powerhouse to contend with.
So here's do, you're gonna take a spreadsheet that you work with.
Regularly, maybe upload it to chat GBT or whatever tool you choose and start asking
it questions about patterns, about trends, or any insights you may not be aware of.
Heck, you might have seen some trends.
Ask it if it sees it too, and have it dig a little deeper.
You'll be amazed at what it will help you discover.
Skill number six, AI automation engineering.
This, I think this is where the real money lives, and this is
where the real money is moving.
That is for sure.
From the things I've seen, automation focused AI roles surged
to 44% of all the AI job postings.
Believe that was Q3 of 2024, so I don't have the more recent data, but
all those numbers overtook pure AI development positions for the first
time, since this has become a thing.
AI automation engineers don't build AI systems from scratch.
No, no, no.
Instead, they find ways to automate current business workflows using
existing AI tools and create recurring revenue systems as a result of this,
they might, here's some examples.
Embed AI within HR to streamline recruiting and onboarding.
They may work across teams to build efficiencies that
directly impact the bottom line.
They may create automated content creation workflows that generate some
passive income opportunities, and they might even build lead follow-up
systems that run on autopilot.
All that grunt work that people are spending hours and hours and hours doing.
Now, those people are freed up to do the human connection thing and
the toolkit that they use includes platforms like Zapier make.com innate
and, and Microsoft Power automates, um, all connected to AI services.
Plus there's emergency frameworks out there like Lang Jane for
more sophisticated AI workflows.
Here's the thing.
Salaries on this one typically start around 70, 70 grand a year
with experienced professionals earning over 150 grand per year.
And here's the beautiful part.
Unlike traditional programming roles, which I started off way back in the day,
they all required years of experience.
You can become proficient in AI automation tools.
Within months.
No joke.
You really can.
Okay, so here's, here's, here's your starting point for this one.
Your first automation project.
Identify one repetitive task in your current job or maybe in your current side.
Hustle and research how to automate it.
Using no-code platforms connected to the AI services that you picked.
So you go to a no-code platform, like a N eight N or a make.com and
connect it to clawed or chat GPT and automate that repetitive task.
Yeah, start learning now.
Skill number seven, and I don't hear many folks talking about this one out there.
AI ethics and governance.
This is your trust builder.
As AI becomes more powerful, the ethical implications grow just as fast.
Heck, they probably grow even more significantly.
The demand for expertise in AI ethics and governance has already grown rapidly with
more than 100,000 professionals with these skills now being requested annually, and
this, this isn't just about compliance.
It's about competitive advantage.
A a striking 67% of consumers are saying that they care about
ethical AI use by the companies that they patronize mentioned earlier.
There's folks out there, uh, bucking the system, the AI system a hundred percent.
So you're gonna, you're gonna wanna make sure it's being used ethically.
A i ethics specialists earn an average salary of about.
$95,000 to $130,000 annually, and the field is expected to grow 15%
annually over the next five years.
Some of the key competencies you're gonna need here include understanding how AI
systems can perpetuate discrimination.
You heard that right?
They can if they're not used correctly.
Knowing how to audit AI outputs for fairness, implementing privacy by design
principles, and communicating AI decisions transparently to all stakeholders.
Here's your ethical foundation for this one.
Before implementing any AI solution, I want you to ask
yourself, how could this go wrong?
Who might be negatively affected, and how can I build safeguards
against both of those scenarios?
Okay.
That brings us to skill number eight, human AI collaboration.
This, my friends, is your force multiplier.
The future isn't about the humans versus ai.
We're, we're not talking about the matrix here.
It's about humans with AI versus humans without ai.
According to a Stanford study, teams that TR strategically mix human and AI
capabilities together outperform those that use AI even in far more limited ways.
Okay?
The key is understanding when to leverage AI's strengths in data processing and
pattern recognition, and when to rely on human strengths in creativity and empathy.
And in contextual judgment, the partnership for the 21st Century
Learning Framework identifies four essential competencies,
critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.
Here's your practice for this one, for your next project, no matter
small or how big it is, consciously decide which parts that you'll
handle personally and which parts are you gonna delegate to ai, document
what works, and then also document.
What doesn't work, so you can rectify that.
Last but not least, skill number nine.
This is continuous learning and adaptation.
This is your competitive moat, and you're gonna make it bigger and bigger
to leverage yourself to the max.
This might be what I, I don't know, the most important skill of all.
This recent research has showed us that 76% of employees believe AI will
create entirely new skills that they don't even know exist yet, and the
professionals who position themselves at the forefront of these emerging skills
will capture a disproportionate value with them in AI exposed jobs specifically.
The skill requirements are changing 66% faster than in traditional roles.
So here's what you need to learn here.
Stay current with emerging AI technologies.
Rapidly prototype new tools and new workflows.
Build networks with in the AI community.
Insert yourself into that network and develop.
Meta learning skills that accelerate skill acquisition.
You wanna learn them as fast as humanly possible, find that area that you dislike.
I love this part right here, and dive in deep.
The beautiful irony is that continuous learning itself creates and becomes
a competitive moat all by itself.
While specific AI tools and techniques will evolve rapidly, the ability to adapt.
Learn will remain valuable regardless of how the technology
landscape changes over time.
And we know it's gonna change.
Just look back at the eighties to the nineties with the introduction of the
internet, let alone the computer, and then how far we've come from there.
Listen, if you're feeling overwhelmed by me just dumping
these nine skills on you, I get it.
Uh, but here's what I want you to understand.
You don't need to master all nine simultaneously.
You just need to start with one, and that's why I created the
uh, AI Skate Plan newsletter.
It's designed for parents like you who are ready to break free
from the nine to five grind.
Each issue delivers practical AI powered strategies to start, grow,
and streamline your side hustles all designed to protect your family time
while still boosting your income.
Think of it as your, your roadmap to more money, more freedom.
More of what truly matters to you, because while everyone else is debating whether
AI is the future, you'll be building the future you want for your family.
Okay?
Now here's why I think all of this matters At a deeper level.
We are, and you know this.
We are witnessing the biggest shift in how work gets done since the Industrial
Revolution, and again, since the, uh, introduction of the internet.
But unlike previous technological shifts in the landscape, those
all took decades to unfold.
This one.
Has happened in months and is continuing to happen over the next few months.
Okay.
The AI skills revolution is creating the biggest career opportunity, I
think, in decades, but the window for the early adopters is, is closing fast.
Companies are moving from experimentation.
Implementation from pilot projects to company wide rollouts and deployments.
So let's, let's be clear here.
This isn't just about technology, it's about freedom.
The professionals who develop these skills now will shape how
AI transforms their industry.
All industries.
More importantly for my parents out there, you'll have the
leverage to work on your own terms.
When you have these skills, the future belongs to those who speak
both languages fluently, the human language and the language of ai.
These nine skills represent your translation dictionary for a world
where bilingual compatibility determines who thrives.
Who's gonna get left behind?
So here's your Whiskered wisdom for this week.
I want you to remember something.
AI will not replace you, but someone using AI quite probably will.
The parents who are quietly building six figure side hustles, they're not lucky.
They're adapting.
They're not waiting for permission from anybody, or they're not
waiting for the perfect time.
They're starting with one skill.
And mastering it and building from there.
So here's your specific action for this week.
Choose one of these nine skills that resonated with you, uh,
in your current situation.
Spend 30 minutes tonight researching it, not planning to research it.
Not saying I'm gonna research, not thinking about researching
it, but actually researching it.
'cause here's what I've learned after helping so many parents escape the
grind, the gap between knowing and doing is where your dreams go to.
But the gap between doing and succeeding, that's where your freedom lives.
The AI revolution, guess what it's happening with or without you.
The question isn't whether you are ready.
It's whether you're willing to start before you even feel ready.
Your family's freedom is waiting for you on the other side of
your willingness to just begin.
Stop waiting for the perfect moment.
Stop waiting for more time.
Stop waiting for someone else to give you the damn permission you already have.
You can give it to yourself.
The tools are here, the opportunity is here.
The only question left is are you here?
With that, I'm gonna leave you as I always do think successfully.
Take action.